In order to produce an effective meeting, there are various roles and responsibilities that should be shared with the attendees. As meeting roles are often very specialized in nature and take brain cycles, attendees should only have a single, not multiple roles, within a meeting. Of course there are exceptions to everything and we'll touch more on this later.
Role assignments should be provided in the meeting invitation to ensure everyone knows in advance what role they'll be taking on and alternates can be found if someone is not going to be in attendance. If it's a standing or semi-regular meeting, ensure that the roles are rotated amongst the attendees for every meeting. This ensures that not a single person is always a certain role but also that they're able to get a breather and be able to attend the meeting in some iterations without a role. One exception to this guidance might be the role assigned to an administrative assistant. As an example, they might always be the scribe across all your meetings.
Types of roles and their names will vary from one organization to the next, but here's a breakdown of the more traditional ones...
Facilitator (Required)
This is the person who is running the meeting. Think of this role as the conductor, leader or navigator of the meeting. You set the direction for where the meeting goes, when to progress to the next agenda item and work to ensure all attendees are involved and active participants.
Time Keeper (Recommended)
This role entails having someone watch the time during the meeting and ensuring that the agenda topics are staying within their scheduled time slots. The person in this role would also provide a heads up when a topic is running out of time as well as when time is up. This role can be particularly effective when paired up with the referee role.
Scribe (Recommended)
This is the person who will be recording the meeting minutes or notes. Ideally this would be assigned to someone else other than the facilitator, although it's common for the facilitator to perform this role as well. For the most effective meetings, it's best to assign this role to someone other than the facilitator, but this does then require coordination of getting the notes from the scribe to the facilitator for inclusion within the meeting minutes. Alternatively, if the facilitator is good at multi-tasking, they can run the meeting and take the notes themselves as the meeting progresses.
Referee (Recommended)
The meeting referee is the person who helps to make sure the meeting stays on track. It's common for meeting topics or discussions to change gears and divert to something other than the current agenda item. The referee should continuously make a mental note as to whether the discussion is relevant and if not, call this out in the meeting to move the discussion back to the scheduled topic at hand.
Observer
The meeting observer is someone who is attending the meeting to simply listen in and provide no input or discussion. If you're working under Agile or Scrum methodologies, you might have various people attend a meeting as an observer such as stakeholders, clients or product owners to a Sprint Review. Or under a more general meeting, you might have a person from a sister organization attend to gather information for their own team or a manager attend to assess the team dynamics.
Decision Maker
The decision maker is a single person or multiple people who will decide upon an important question, direction the team should take, etc. Sometimes the people in the role simply have authority to make these decisions and other times they also have a monetary budget or access to resources, people, assets, locations, etc. to help the meeting or the team. Sometimes you will have a decision maker always present in the meeting if there are numerous and regular decisions to be held. Other times you may want to strategically invite a decision maker to a particular meeting instance if you know there's a decision you'll need their input on.
Outsider
The outsider role is similar to the observer role except that they do provide input and discussion within the meeting. This can be someone outside of a project's regular attendees, such as human resources, legal, finance, etc., or maybe someone working on a parallel project. In some organizations, this might be a dotted-line assignment to the meeting.
Tech Host
In larger meetings, it might be beneficial to have someone other than the facilitator manage the technical aspects of the meeting including the online meeting software, physical phones in the conference room, in room cameras, etc. By assigning someone to the tech host role, they take on all of the technical aspects of the meeting thereby freeing up the facilitator to manage and facilitate the meeting without being encumbered by any technology hiccups.
Chat Moderator
If you have an online meeting, there's a high likelihood that there will be a chat function within the software. Similar to the tech host role, assigning someone to be the online chat moderator, frees up cycles from the facilitator so that they can better focus on running the meeting.
For most everyday meetings, plan on assigning the required and recommended roles. Use the other roles on an add needed basis, not just to load level the work, but also so that all attendees can understand who might be attending as an observer, outsider or even decision maker to the meeting.
By assigning meeting roles, your meetings will become better run with fewer ambiguities. And with help along the way, the facilitator will be able to keep the meeting on track and deliver to the purpose and agenda.